How I Blew My Students' Minds Today

After having been set adrift as I flit in and out of Berkeley these past few months, my Spanish class settled down this week to read Miguel de Unamuno's classic Niebla, an existencial romp in which Unamuno himself (student comment: "He looks like Freud!") enters the novel (actually, he calls it a nivola so he can break all the rules of genre), meets the main character, Augusto, threatens to kill him, gorges him to death (or maybe Augusto kills himself...), then kills his dog, too.

At one point Augusto tells Unamuno that maybe Unamuno is really only a fictional creation, and not actually in control of the novel he's writing. Moreover, he says, maybe the novel's readers are fictional creations, too. So, if that's the case, I told my students, it follows that we, this Spanish 107B class, are also fictional creations, and perhaps we're even being written into the narrative of Niebla, as we speak, by Unamuno himself. Dude!!!

P.S. Does anyone know how to translate "blow your mind" into Spanish? The best I came up with was os estoy rompiendo las mentes, which doesn't quite work. Just for future reference, for the next time I blow their minds.